Power Laws and the Growth of Religious Sects

Dan Dennett has this idea that the spread of religion is basically about competition in the intellectual marketplace - an idea is offered up and people attach to/accept it based on some sort of free market kinds of dynamics. My idea is to pursue a "natural" ramification of this - that is to look for a power law in the way in which these market dynamics evolve. I.e., can we see if we find a power law in affiliation - i.e., numbers of people in various "sects" or religious groups - basically like wealth distribution related to religious ideas. It has a natural generative model, so it would be an interesting little note, but needs a good source of data.

Along similar lines, I wonder if it would be possible to construct a phylogenetic tree that shows the diversity/disparity growth in religious ideas - again, charting the development of sects, splinter groups, etc.

Finally, one could try to do the same thing w/respect to the evolution of terrorist groups (pick your favorite - ugh - conflict).

Comments

Don't know about phylogenetic tree for diversity/disparity/growth of religious ideas...but smallist political groups that splinter often can be an interesting study (You could make an argument that for particularly sectarian political groups political beliefs are almost quasi-religious). For examples, see the evolution of Trotskyist groups in the USA (all of which go back to the Socialist Workers Party genealogically). The page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Trotskyist_organizations_of_the_United_States can be a good source of information). See also the evolution of communist parties in India (there are many currently, all of which can be genealogically traced back to the original Communist Party of India (you can trace their history via : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Communist_parties_of_India)) -- S.B.

This has basically been my approach to analyzing the evolution of the blogosphere (as an idea market) even though it does not specifically focus on religion. My motivation was Dawkins work, especially what he had to say about the means by which memes and memesets are propagated: partly by people opting-in and partly by various means of persuasion. I'm interested in seeing whether a power law results (as discussed above and is the current state of the blogosphere) or if the long-term distribution is a kind of reversed power law. Today we see a few religions with a lot of members and many sects with a few members, same story in the blogosphere. But I wonder whether there isn't a slow migration to the sects where eventually, the big religions will be diminished in size and sects will hold the majority (a long fat tail). I hypothesize this migration is a process of cultural tribalization: people congregating on the basis of a narrow scope of shared ideas rather than tolerance for a diversity of ideas. -- Paul.

• sounds interesting, i will send you some data sources later. rafal